In This Together

Sunday, September 18, 2011 – In This Together

I am of the opinion that my life belongs to the whole community and as long as I live, it is my privilege to do for it whatever I can. I want to be thoroughly used up when I die, for the harder I work the more I live. ~ George Bernard Shaw

One is a member of a country, a profession, a civilization, a religion. One is not just a man. ~ Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Wartime Writings 1939-1944

Every individual has a place to fill in the world and is important in some respect whether he chooses to be so or not. ~ Nathaniel Hawthorne

“Independence”… [is] middle-class blasphemy. We are all dependent on one another, every soul of us on earth. ~ George Bernard Shaw, Pygmalion, 1912

In the end, poverty, putridity and pestilence; work, wealth and worry; health, happiness and hell, all simmer down into village problems. ~ Martin H. Fischer

Few of us could bear to have ourselves for neighbors. ~ Mignon McLaughlin, The Second Neurotic’s Notebook, 1966

What should young people do with their lives today? Many things, obviously. But the most daring thing is to create stable communities in which the terrible disease of loneliness can be cured. ~ Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.

Community cannot for long feed on itself; it can only flourish with the coming of others from beyond, their unknown and undiscovered brothers. ~ Howard Thurman

There will always be a part, and always a very large part of every community, that have no care but for themselves, and whose care for themselves reaches little further than impatience of immediate pain, and eagerness for the nearest good. ~ Samuel Johnson

One who breaks an unjust law that conscience tells him is unjust, and who willingly accepts the penalty of imprisonment in order to arouse the conscience of the community over its injustice, is in reality expressing the highest respect for law. ~ Martin Luther King, Jr.

In effect, to follow, not to force the public inclination; to give a direction, a form, a technical dress, and a specific sanction, to the general sense of the community, is the true end of legislature. ~ Edmund Burke

The community stagnates without the impulse of the individual. The impulse dies away without the sympathy of the community. ~ William James

I am not aware that any community has a right to force another to be civilized. ~ John Stuart Mill

You cannot sift out the poor from the community. The poor are indispensable to the rich. ~ Henry Ward Beecher

By giving us the opinions of the uneducated, journalism keeps us in touch with the ignorance of the community. ~ Oscar Wilde

Great bodies of people are never responsible for what they do. ~ Virginia Woolf

In order to stand well in the eyes of the community, it is necessary to come up to a certain, somewhat indefinite, conventional standard of wealth. ~ Thorstein Veblen

Any young man who is unmarried at the age of twenty one is a menace to the community. ~ Brigham Young

Community begins in mystery and ends in administration. Leaders move away from people and into paper. ~ Jean Vanier

In 1950, when the Giants signed me, they gave me $15,000. I bought a 1950 Mercury. I couldn’t drive, but I had it in the parking lot there, and everybody that could drive would drive the car. So it was like a community thing. ~ Willie Mays

We started off trying to set up a small anarchist community, but people wouldn’t obey the rules. ~ Alan Bennett

For a solitary animal egoism is a virtue that tends to preserve and improve the species: in any kind of community it becomes a destructive vice. ~ Erwin Schrodinger

One definition of eternity is that we are not alone on this planet, that there are those who’ve gone before and those who will come, and that there is a community of spirits. ~ Rita Dove

In response to the challenge of strangers, sport arose as a sublimated representation of a community’s armed might as well as its pride of place and clan. ~ John Thorn

Nothing defines the quality of life in a community more clearly than people who regard themselves, or whom the consensus chooses to regard, as mentally unwell. ~ Renata Adler

Individuals can resist injustice, but only a community can do justice. ~ James J. Corbett

It is a strange fact that freedom and equality, the two basic ideas of democracy, are to some extent contradictory. Logically considered, freedom and equality are mutually exclusive, just as society and the individual are mutually exclusive. ~ Thomas Mann
There would be no society if living together depended upon understanding each other. ~ Eric Hoffer

When they are alone they want to be with others, and when they are with others they want to be alone. After all, human beings are like that. ~ – Gertrude Stein

–

Now my friends, I am opposed to the system of society in which we live today, not because I lack the natural equipment to do for myself but because I am not satisfied to make myself comfortable knowing that there are thousands of my fellow men who suffer for the barest necessities of life. We were taught under the old ethic that man’s business on this earth was to look out for himself. That was the ethic of the jungle; the ethic of the wild beast. Take care of yourself, no matter what may become of your fellow man. Thousands of years ago the question was asked; ”Am I my brother’s keeper?” That question has never yet been answered in a way that is satisfactory to civilized society.

Yes, I am my brother’s keeper. I am under a moral obligation to him that is inspired, not by any maudlin sentimentality but by the higher duty I owe myself. What would you think me if I were capable of seating myself at a table and gorging myself with food and saw about me the children of my fellow beings starving to death. ~ Eugene V. Debs

About This Site

This site offers a daily column on current events, and unlike other blogs, in long form. Short posts pointing to this and that and saying "Oh my!" seems a bit lazy. Columns here are an attempt to think things through. If you'd like to come along for the ride, fine. If you have neither the time nor patience for that, that is also fine - you can click on the LINKS tab at the top of the page and visit the sites that offer quick hits. Those provide the raw material for the analyses here.

The views here are mine alone, save for the occasional column from Ric in Paris or comments from key readers, like Rick, the News Guy in Atlanta, and others.

Commentary and guest columns are posted here, but there is a sister site, Just Above Sunset Photography, where images are far more important than words. That site is updated daily. Take a look.

JUST ABOVE SUNSET has been online, in various formats, since May 2003. Click on the ABOUT tab at the top of the page for more on that, and a note on who I am.